Course Description

Instructor: David Slavin, PhD

While the “long� New Deal of the FDR and Truman administrations was an era of radical reform, it also reconfigured racial inequality on a national scale. The Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic majority dominated Congress and insured that the panoply of New Deal programs and policies preserved white supremacy in the South and expanded the Jim Crow system’s scope to the rest of the US. The labor movement, suburbanization -- arguably the entire structure of recent US history -- has been shaped by this inherent contradiction of American progressive politics: racial inequality embedded in liberalism. Righting the exclusions of the New Deal galvanized the 1960s civil rights movement and provoked, in turn, a perpetual and ongoing “white backlash.�